Zooarchaeology (Other Keyword)
1,001-1,025 (1,356 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Pastoralism in a Global Perspective" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In ancient Mesopotamia, animal husbandry was intimately bound up with the process of state making. The twin institutional powers of palace and temple managed enormous herds of sheep and goats. But were these animals mere wealth-on-the-hoof, staple goods supporting a classic system of staple finance? Or were they something else, operating...
Rethinking the Formative Stage: A reconsideration from two archaeological sites on the Colombian Caribbean lowlands (2017)
The concept of formative in Colombia is traditionally framed as a transitional period within the unilineal cultural evolution in the Americas, characterized for several indicators such as sedentary life, diversity of socio-economic forms and the emergence of new technologies such as pottery. In this paper, we revised two archaeological sites: Monsu and Puerto Hormiga, incorporating zooarchaeological analysis, technological and use–wear analyses to provide understanding into past human behavior...
Return to the West End Site: Zooarchaeological Results from a Tongva Village on Catalina Island (2017)
Native American subsistence practices on the California Channel Islands are characterized by a variety of rich marine sea foods ranging from shellfish to dolphin. Fluctuation in these maritime diets throughout the Holocene has been posited to represent social and ecological phenomena in the ancient past. This poster presents recent zooarchaeological results, as well as the first radiocarbon assays, of a faunal collection that was excavated from the West End Site on Santa Catalina Island in...
Returning Home: Zooarchaeological and Bioarchaeological Insights on Nasca Domestic Foodways and Local Mortuary Traditions at Cocahuischo, Peru (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations between 2010 and 2012 at the Nasca site of Cocahuischo (300-700 CE) recorded domestic and mortuary activities of a large local community composed of 130 house structures, patio preparation spaces and dozens of cist tombs. Employing zooarchaeological and bioarchaeological techniques to the human, vertebrate and invertebrate remains from...
Review of Hell Gap; A Stratified Paleoindian Campsite at the Edge of the Rockies (2009)
Review of Hell Gap; A Stratified Paleoindian Campsite at the Edge of the Rockies
Review of Vertebrate Taphonomy (1995)
Review of Vertebrate Taphonomy
Risky Business? Prey Choice in Pleistocene and Holocene Northern Australia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Do Good Things Come in Small Packages? Human Behavioral Ecology and Small Game Exploitation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although archaeofaunal assemblages from northern Australia are limited, records indicate an early adoption of "broad-spectrum" diets. Inland, key prey items consist of small- to medium-sized mammals and reptiles, with large kangaroos being exploited less frequently. On the coast, shellfish, fish...
Risky Research (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sebastian Payne made a lasting impact on zooarchaeology, especially in the Old World, with his 1973 paper outlining age and sex mortality profiles that characterize the prioritization of meat, milk, or wool. Richard Redding was the first scholar not only to suggest that these optimizing models might not...
Ritual Deposition of Avifauna in the Northern Burial Cluster at Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon (2018)
Birds are an important part of both modern and historic Puebloan ceremonialism: live birds, stuffed birds, and bird wings and feathers are used in prayers, in ceremonies, as sacrifices, and in the creation of ritual paraphernalia. Archaeological evidence suggests birds held a similar role in the past for some prehispanic Southwestern groups, including members of the Chaco phenomenon. Pueblo Bonito is one member of the Chaco system that might be expected to contain evidence of ritual use of...
Ritual Fauna Use in an Elite Ancient Maya Burial: Examination of an Animal Long-Bone Cache in the Recently Discovered Royal Tomb at Xunantunich, Belize (2017)
Animal use in elite burials can provide a more holistic perspective on the importance of specific fauna as prestige goods or as status and power markers in the Maya world. This presentation discusses a discrete cache of animal long-bones located at the feet of a human burial recovered from the newly discovered royal tomb at Xunantunich during the 2016 field season of the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance (BVAR) project. Maya zooarchaeologists have long held that the use of specific...
The Ritual Lives of Southwest Dogs (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dogs, as the first domesticated species, have held a wide range of roles in human societies including hunting assistants, guardians, companions, and food sources. In this poster we will explore their ceremonial roles through a comparative analysis of the life histories of ritually deposited dogs. Specifically, we will compare Southwest dog burials to a late...
Riverine Fisheries in Nineteenth Century Hida: In Affluent Foragers: Pacific Coasts East and West (1979)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Rockshelters in the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming; Environment, Ecology, and Landuse Patterns (2015)
Archaeologists have investigated many aspects of rockshelters in the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, but questions remain about the role of these sites within regional settlement patterns. It is clear that the Bighorn Basin is a moisture-controlled ecosystem and that variability in environmental moisture levels produces dramatic changes in both animal and plant populations. Changes in environmental moisture also appear to affect human population levels, and past settlement and subsistence patterns. This...
The Role of Diet Diversity and Breadth in the Maya “Collapse” (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Debate has surrounded the Terminal Classic (AD 750–900/1000) Maya “collapse,” a period when the Classic period political structure deteriorated and parts of the southern lowlands were depopulated. While these changes were the result of various developments including warfare, social unrest, environmental degradation, and climate change, one...
The Role of Faunal Evidence in Pyrodiversity Studies: Cases from California (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Insights into Pyrodiversity and Seascape Management on the Central California Coast" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ascertaining the past existence of fire-based landscape management practices requires the use of multiple lines of geological, arboreal fire scar, pollen and charcoal, archaeobotanical, and faunal evidence. In our initial project in a now-woody valley near the Central California coast, these and...
The Role of Human Predation in the Structuring of Prehistoric Prey Populations in Northwestern California (BLM) (2008)
A doctoral dissertation by Adrian Whitaker. This paper discusses the implications of faunal remains found at nine prehistoric archaeological sites in Humboldt and Mendocino Counties, California for the effects human predation had on populations of mussels, artiodactyls, and sea mammals.
Role of Labrid Fish in Prehistoric Economics In New Zealand (1979)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
Rooms, Compounds, Alley Dumps, and Neighborhoods: Intrasite Zooarchaeology on Peru’s North Coast (2017)
The increasing number of samples of zooarchaeological remains from the prehistoric Chimu settlement of Cerro La Virgen, on the North Coast of Peru, allow a comparison of consumption and discard patterns within and between households and neighborhoods. The information from this analysis adds to our understanding of economic and political realities of life in a community which would have to balance the demands of family consumption and the state tributes requested by the Chimu polity. Of special...
Rules for Fishy Trash? (2016)
Analysis of intrasite spatial variation can improve our understanding of the dynamics of daily living of past populations. Fish remains are a special type of trash with distinctive aspects of capture, transport, preparation, and discard when compared to other fauna. This paper focuses on the analysis of fish remains from the Chimu site of Cerro La Virgen (A.D. 1000-1470) on the north coast of Peru. Cerro La Virgen is a rural town of mixed economy, including both fishing and agriculture, linked...
Running with the Mules: Integrating Zooarchaeological, Archaeological and Textural Evidence to Reconstruct the Exploitation of Equids in Southwest Asia (2018)
The equid had a vital role in animal economy in Southwest Asia, whether as a wild animal providing primary/secondary products to prehistoric communities, or as a domestic source of energy which supported war affairs and trade during historic periods. Reconstructing the dynamics of humans and the four-equid species, which were present in the region, is a complicated endeavor due to the paucity of skeletal evidence in faunal assemblages; the difficulties in distinguishing morphological traits to...
Sablefish (Anoplopoma fimbria) and Human Ecodynamics at Tse-whit-zen and the Salish Sea (2017)
Zooarchaeological evidence from Tse-whit-zen indicates that juvenile sablefish, or black cod (Anoplopoma fimbria), played an important role in the village’s economy for ~2,200 years, but sablefish is scarcely mentioned in previous Northwest Coast archaeological research. The near-total absence of this species from other coastal sites in the Salish Sea cannot be explained by post-depositional destruction, screen size, sample size, or differences in zooarchaeological identification criteria. Thus,...
Sacred or Mundane? Use of Comparative Zooarchaeology to Interpret Feature Significance at Kingsley Plantation, Jacksonville, Florida (2017)
Field schools offered by the University of Florida between 2006 and 2013 yielded exceptional potential to understand the lifeways of enslaved Africans who lived and labored at Kingsley Plantation, located on Fort George Island in Jacksonville, Florida (1814-1839). In 2013, excavations included a high-density deposit discovered in front of a slave cabin. It resembled an ordinary trash pit in some ways, but also contained some objects that have been associated with ritual or religious activity in...
The Sacred Shells Speak: Sclerochronology and Oxygen Stable Isotopes in S. crassiquama (princeps) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This project broadly examines shell ring growth patterns in the Pacific bivalve S. crassisquama (princeps). Spondylus shells were incorporated into pre-Columbian Inca (and greater Andean) ceremonial and ritualistic practices consistently until Spanish colonization. Existing paleoecological and archaeomalacology approaches have relied on oxygen isotopic...
Sacrifice or Feasting: Fauna Interpretations of the First Iron Age Romanian commingled assemblages at Măgura Uroiului (2017)
The Magura Uroiului rock formation, located at the confluence of the Mures and Strei Valleys, is a natural, dominating fortress on the landscape. This rock formation has been utilized by groups including, the Hallstatt, Celtic, and Late Iron Age Dacian. The focus of this presentation is the First Iron Age mortuary monument located at the base of the rock face. This monument yielded both human and animal remains, with primary and secondary burial practices of the human remains occurring. The...
Sacrifice, Meat Consumption, and Bone Working at the Curiae Veteres: Zooarchaeological Findings from the Sixth- and Fifth-Century BCE Levels of the Palatine-Pendici Nord-Est Excavations in Rome, Italy (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Bones to Human Behavior" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent archaeological projects, such as those of the Palatine-Pendici nord-est excavation, are bringing new materials and new clarity to the processes of social change that lead to urbanism in Rome, Italy. The Curiae Veteres sanctuary, located in the heart of Rome on the northern slopes of the Palatine Hill, gives exceptional insight into the earliest...